July 14, 2012

A couple of years ago, the philanthropy reporter for the Jewish Telegraph Agency tried to divvy up by ancestry the Forbes 400 of America's richest individuals and came up with the headline "At least 139 of Forbes 400 are Jewish."

It was an interesting start, but was also bogged down by obvious errors. (E.g., No, George Lucas isn't Jewish.)

The blogger n/a of "race / history / evolution notes" then took on the task of improving the Jewish Telegraph Agency's published list, which he did in 2009. His latest version is the 2010 Forbes 400 list.

Obviously, this kind of thing isn't easy to do. I'm sure there are mistakes in it, but I haven't noticed any glaring ones. The most likely source of errors is when some obscure rich guy happens to have a name that doesn't align well with his ancestry. But those are hard to catch.

His task is simplified by using a group called "Northwestern Europeans" that makes up 50.75% of the 2010 Forbes list, down from 72% in Nathaniel Weyl's count of the 1987 list. "Northwestern Europeans" lump together English, Scottish, Welsh, Dutch, Irish (Catholic and Protestant), Scandinavians, French, Belgians, Swiss, Germans, and Austrians. It's not much of a bloc.

A more subtle pair of methodological problems are what to do with people of mixed ancestry and with people who were adopted. A dual example is the late Steve Jobs. He's listed as one of the eight (2.0%) who are "Middle Eastern" because his biological father is Syrian.

I think it would be better to divide up ancestry into fractions when possible.

And, though trans-ethnic adoptions are fairly rare, when they are known about, I think it makes sense to treat Nature and Nurture as, more or less, equally important. So, ideally (by my lights), Jobs would be classed as 1/4th Middle Eastern (i.e., half nature, no nurture) and 3/4th NW European (half nature, all nurture).

It's not clear how much these refinements would alter the list. It would depend if interethnic marriages tend to be skewed by sex.

Overall, I doubt if the summary percentages would be changed a whole lot by refinements. For example, the JTA count was pretty laughable in part, but the overall number of Jews the JTA reporter came up with was almost identical to what n/a's much more careful study arrived at. That's because random errors tend to neutralize each other.

The low Eastern European percentage is interesting. There are a fair number of Slavs in the U.S., but they tend to maintain a low profile. Moreover, they have a fairly high rate of Anglicizing their names to make them easier to spell. For example, I know two Polish-American identical twin millionaires (not Forbes billionaires) from Chicago who, upon setting out to make their fortune agreed to ditch "Wojtyla" (as in the late Pope) for a much easier to pronounce and spell English name. In contrast, while Italian names are recognizably non-English, they are reasonably easy to spell and pronounce, plus have more glamor associated with them due to all the Italian celebrities since the Renaissance.

As I've mentioned before, Italians make a pretty good apples to apples comparison to Jews: they arrived about the same time in the U.S., they live in about the same parts of the country, they are both non-rural, they are both non-Protestants, and so forth. Italian-Americans strike me as pretty typical white American gentilers in terms of achievements on average. They make up about 8% of the white gentile population and about 6% of the white gentile Forbes 400. That's pretty good considering their late start in America. (For example, there are five Hearsts on the Forbes 400, and their fortune goes back to William Randolph Hearst's dad striking it rich in the Comstock Lode before the Civil War.) But it's also nothing all that special either.

Italians are usually thought to be about three times as numerous as Jews in America (roughly 6% of the total population versus 2%) , but they are almost an order of magnitude less common in absolute terms on the Forbes 400 (17 v. 143), which suggests Jews are about 20 or 25 times more likely to make the Forbes 400 on a per capita basis. That's a big difference.

Weyl's 1987 count found Jews made up about 23 percent, which suggests that the Jewish proportion of the super-rich has grown by 50% over 23 years (keep in mind that there is a lot of turnover in the Forbes 400 list due to different sectors of the economy going in and out of fashion -- e.g., oil, tech, finance, real estate, etc.) But, there have also been a sizable number of Jews among the very richest for a long time.

Jews outnumber blacks 143-1 amongst the American mega-rich, despite the fact that blacks outnumber Jews by better than 5-1 in the general US population, so that means Jews are about 715 times more numerous among the mega rich. Hmmm, Jews also outnumber blacks among Nobel laureates in the sciences 127-0, despite the fact blacks are least 50 times more numerous than Jews in the world population, but in order for ratio to be 635 times higher there would have to be at least one black scientist with a Nobel Prize, but there aren't any. There is one however in economics, Arthur Lewis, but alas there are also 27 more Jews with Nobel Prizes in economics, so that means a ratio of 154-1, eerily similar to ratio amongst the mega-rich. However because we are talking about the world population the ratio of elite scientists and economists is about 7700-1 in favor of the Jews over Africans. This seems very unfair, we demand affirmative action in Nobel Prizes and wealth creation in " Redress the historical imbalance " in Nobel Prizes and Billionaires. Are Jews even aware of this? They must see that discrimination has been unable to hold Jews back, but despite active discriminatory hiring and college admissions favoring blacks for four decades, no such bump in achievement has accrued to them. Jews achieved these successes despite the fact that Uncle Leo didn't get into Yale, and Grandpa Mort not getting Harvard. These stats kind of obliterate the rationale for AA. As noted philosopher William Shatner once stated "Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes"

I know that many readers are familiar with the Peak Oil Theory. I sometimes think about a Peak Jew Theory. I wonder if Jews will soon reach a peak in terms of their influence and power in the U.S.

It is clear to me that their influence in the media is receding. Their control of the New York Times is not nearly as big a deal as it used to be. They can't really control the Internet. They are so dominant in banking and finance that it seems to me that the only direction they can go is down. I also have a sense that younger Jewish men, raised in relative wealth and comfort, are not as aggressive as their fathers.

Another interesting question is if we are already at or near Peak Jew, what American group will grow in influence to fill the void left by declining Jewish influence?

"They are the g factor grand masters; they are the cream that rises to the top in whatever endeavor they choose to participate."

Not in the visual world, though, except for all that talent-less mid-century junk. Kubrick is about the only towering figure.

Speaking of the contrast with Italians, we see it here too, in reverse. Fellini, Vittorio Storaro, Scorsese, etc., are just a handful in the movie world. Jews would have an "in" in Hollywood, so this comparison is the most favorable to them.

Although Jews are pretty well represented among critics and collectors of painting and sculpture. So I think they'd have an "in" there too, yet haven't accomplished anything, unlike scores of Italians.

Celts are another good contrast. They've had their own distinct culture apart from England, were looked down on, etc. for a long time.

It may have taken them awhile, like until the late 1800s, but the Celts have done pretty well in the visual world too, per capita. From the Glasgow School during the Art Nouveau era to Ridley Scott and David Lynch more recently.

This different ethnic make-up in the visual world makes it more enjoyable, as it tends to be spared of the more radical, corrosive, and antipathetic influences that you find in domains with decent Jewish influence.

And it's not as though the Celts and Italians are not risk-taking, rambunctious, informal, and so on, traits that tend to contrast with the more mainstream WASP culture. But it's always in good fun -- bawdy but not obscene, carousing but not chaotic, chastising but not belittling, novelty-seeking but not recklessly experimental, thrifty but not miserly.

Finally, because Jews tend not to do well in the visual world, they're more humble when they become fans of the good stuff, nearly always created by Gentiles. It's the one time when they aren't snarkily smirking about the goyishe kopf.

At the end of Manhattan, Woody Allen may admire Groucho Marx's humor, but for visual delight he looks up to Cezanne's apples and pears, and makers of Swedish movies.

You may run into some screwy ones where the verbal side of movies are the focus, but those aren't too hard to avoid. And once you get to the fully visual -- painting, architecture, design and craftsmanship -- you've got it made in the shade.

The smartest Asian Indians have some of the same combination of verbal skills

Indian-Americans form about ~10 percent of the medical school students in this country, but 4-5 percent of the entry level associates in top law firms. With Jews, I'm sure the numbers must be reversed.

There are a fair number of Indians in finance, but they tend to stay away from trading and brokerage.

To be honest, I really haven't found most Indians to be super strong at verbal - not the way Jews tend to be. The smarts are more on the technical side. Indians also have Tiger/Eagle parents and a pretty good work ethic, so that helps too...

extraversion.

Jews seem to have a tendency towards risk-taking, outside the box thinking, and aggressive noncomformity. So being aggressively verbal comes naturally to them. Indians, not so much. It's definitely more of shame-based, somewhat (not excessively) comformist culture among Indians. Indians are extroverted in that they tend to be moderately social, but verbal aggressiveness and strong opinionating are not strong points. Though Indians are more in that direction than East Asians.

On the other hand, it's not clear if they have the same edge

With Jews, they seem to have more of a a tendency to rise to the top. For example, if they form 10 percent of the students at MBA program, they may be 20 percent of the students selected to work at top companies.... and maybe 40 percent of the students who get promoted to executive management at those top companies. At every step, they seem to outdo the rest. This isn't neccessarily true of Indians and definitely not true of Asians.

Jews also are more willing to take risks. Such as dropping out of college to start Facebook and Dell. Or forgetting about med school in order to work in high risk finance.

The low Eastern European percentage is interesting. There are a fair number of Slavs in the U.S., but they tend to maintain a low profile.

As one of those Slavs, I'd like to comment. Few things to mention: 1) There can be little doubt that Slavic IQ is couple notches lower that of Germanic people. The whole European history and culture speaks to it. 2) Slavs that become filthy rich tend to do so on home turf, away from competition and close to familiar corrupt ways of doing business. They are many Slavic billionaires and almost all of them stayed home. Another thing is that ethnic Russians are only slightly more than 50% of the billionaires in Russia. The other 50% are Jews and various Oriental merchant-heavy ethnicities.

I could complain about being a Jew who is QUITE not on the list and the sort of odd discomfort I feel by not having money yet being begrudged by istevers (and most Americans) as a supposedly rich jew, but instead of doing that I'll be redoubling my efforts to get on that goddamn list and increase that jewish percentage whether the jews already abroad like it or not (answer: they don't). Screw them and screw the anti-them, I'll get on the list (well, close enough at least) and whatever heartburn it gives to the established semites and the whiny anti-semites... all the better.

Steve, most Italian-Americans originated from either Sicily or the Mezzogiorno (south of Italy). Most came from fairly miserable peasant backgrounds, illiteracy was rife and few were educated. Some had useful blue-collar trades (eg masons, plasterers, blacksmiths etc), but most knew nothing beyond wielding a scythe or guiding a plough. By contrast, most of the Jews that came to America were already established in the middle class of their originating nations and were generally small traders, tailors, business people etc, there were hardly any farmers or laborers amongst them, and they were generally literate, what's more they have and had a great reverance for scholars and education, and if poorly educated themselves would do everything humanly possible to ensure their kids were eduacted. Italians, in general, never had this reverance for education. Times have chaged now, but previously Italians were a quintessential working class, in that they valued a fair day's pay for a fair day's work above all else. Books were something for the local landlord ('don')or the village priest to pore over, not something a countryman would waste his time with.

On the lack of East Europeans - I will make this point again - true Russian and Ukrainian Slavs (as opposed to "Russian Jews" or Russians of German/Polish descent) are well below Western Europeans in average intelligence. Their disfunctional behavior reminds me of blacks. There is probably a good reason why Germans over the centuries considered them "inferior". I suspect this is genetic and has to do with Russians being bred for centuries as serfs (and most Russian nobility was not very Slavic by blood - lots of German, Tatar, Polish, Swedish, Finnish, etc.) On the other hand, an argument that Russian underperformance may be due more to culture/environment than genes might be the fact that you see similiar disfunctional behavior in English and Scottish proles. Chronic alcohol abuse certainly depresses intelligence among Northern Europeans.

Jewish domination of Hollywood is already beginning to decline. Not so much on the executive/agent/manager side, but certainly on the creative side, where new directors are more likely to be a sharp Englishman like Chris Nolan or below-the-line guys made good like the (hilariously non-Mexican) Bandito Brothers who directed Act of Valor. And the spread of screenwriting websites and self-help books has helped crack the monopoly of USC/UCLA film program-schooled upper middle class Jewish guys from greater LA. Now a successful tv or film writer is as likely to be someone like Battlestar Galactica's Ron Moore (Catholic boy from Chowchilla) as JJ Abrams (Jewish son of a Hollywood producer.)

Funny how even here, at this outpost, there is still little understanding of The Racket.

Hello! A Nobel Prize in Economics is one credential that the Global Mafia hands out to a favorite hired goon.

Hello!!

The Syndicate uses the catspaws of Free Trade, Open Borders, Keynesian Debt, Multiculturalism, etc to wreck the Western nations and still, even here at this rebel outpost, there are kudos and status affirmations for the hired goons.

Our nations are teetering on debt mountains. Industry has been shipped out. The media is Sovietized, as are the universities. Literature, art & music have nose dived. We are well into the collapse phase of empire.

None of this was an accident. Unchecked organized crime eventually collapses any system.

Those rich lists are kind of curious. I can think of at least 2 groups that result in an erroneous list.

1) People who are hiding their wealth. I for one do not know of any crypto billionaires but let's say a former Pentagon official during the Global War on Terror had a bank balance in the billions. I think there would be much effort in hiding that and staying off the list. The world list of billionaires is even more amusing. Shouldn't it be filled with Gulf Arabs and even a few Afghans at this point? There are other reasons to stay of such lists including kidnapping risk, not wanting to reveal your wealth to family, friends, associates and Uncle Sam.

2) People who are not rich but want to be on the list for personal and business reasons. Lets say you had a real estate business where billions of assets were matched by billions of liabilities. A stickler might point out that your Assets - Liabilities were about the same as any middle class American. But I bet if you talk to the right people at Forbes, or perhaps if your investment bankers do, you will still make the list. I think at various times Donald Trump's liabilities exceeded assets, but this was never a problem for the Donald. Getting a bank loan must be easier if you are on the list, right?

So which ethnic groups might be more inclined to type 1 and type 2 errors? Damned if I know.

There is an interesting and possibly related speculation, starting with Henry Harpending’s comment on Greg Cochran’s 7/13 posting at West Hunter.

If the speculation is true and I understand it correctly, it might imply that the high temperatures and high rates of mutation in equatorial Africa: 1) promoted, over the long term, the big advance in biological intelligence, that is, the evolution of man; but 2) tended to diminish the average intelligence of those men who stayed in Africa, compared with that of those who migrated north.

Scots-Irish also are more willing to take risks. Such as dropping out of college to start Facebook and Dell.

The risk that the Scots-Irishman who started Facebook faced was the risk of going to prison - for stealing all of his Harvard classmates' intellectual property, for breaking back into their servers and vandalizing their website, for lying through his teeth in every contract he ever signed, for lying through his teeth in every deposition he ever gave, for breaking every law on the books in Facebook's IPO [and thereby cheating many of Facebook's IPO partners out of literally BILLIONS of dollars], etc etc etc.

In fact, he was such a brave, courageous, magnanimous Scots-Irish soul that he graciously consented to marrying his Harvard sweetheart the very day AFTER the Facebook IPO, so as to minimize his exposure in any possible California state divorce proceeding.

I mean - seriously - how does all this Scots-Irish propaganda and disinformation make its way past Komment Kontrol, and yet half [or more] of my posts get censored?

I'm starting to wonder whether maybe iSteve might be some sort of a honeypot trap created by the Scots-Irish so as to lure guys like me into believing that our voices are actually being heard.

Speaking as a Jewish guy who holds an passing interest in these areas.

First of all, Indian-American, interesting comments. I agree that East Asians are far too conformist to really break the ranks. Also, Jews are much more protective of their nests than the WASPs were. In part because the WASPs back in the 1960s were not their best and brightest.

Most of the brightest WASPs were poor. The stereotypical example I use is Bill Clinton. Very bright, but also energetic and 'Jewish' in the sense that he was very driven and even a little bit shameless in his pursuit of power(and I mean that as a mostly good thing).

Now the WASPs up at the top are usually quite bright. They are far brighter than their predecessors.

So why the drop in NW representation? Two theories.

First, legacy. Today, someone who went to college in the 60s and the 70s is entering the final phase of their careers, whereby it becomes obvious if they made it or not. A lot of WASPs from earlier generations were sometimes not the brightest and inherited a much higher amount of stuff. Today, the WASPs who are 60 or so are much more likely to be self-made.

This makes the pool smaller, but also much more resilient. I think the bottom is probably here and now.

Secondly, the Jewish part:

As someone said previously, most of the Jews are in very stereotypical places, hedge funds, banks, real estate, hollywood etc.

One theory why the share has risen is the corresponding rise of inequality in America. Although most Jews are against it(include myself), most elite Jews are for it. Which also explains the phenomenom of Republican Jews the closer to the top you get.

Part of it is just selfishness, and part of it is probably(Im talking about really old Jews, people pushing mid-60s and above) also a sense of ethnocentrism. Now we've arrived, let's keep it! Or something.

And if the country becomes more equal the next 20 years, my guess is that our share will decrease. Right now, Jews are overrepresented in hedge funds, finance etc. This helps our placement at the top but the cost is also vast inequality, which I think cannot and won't stand.

Tech is an interesting area. I view it as far more creative than, say, hedge funds. Hedge funds requires brains, but you're not creating anything. Tech is also filled with young people, so it's an interesting take at the sociology of elite, young Jews.

The Google guys.. Zuckerberg(although, he probably stole most of the facebook source code from the Winklevoss).

David Karp(of Tumblr). Some of the co-founders of Twitter(even if it is considered Jack Dorsey's baby).All of them Jewish.

What is interesting in tech, however, is that the Jews there are uber-assimilated. Larry Page married a non-Jew. David Karp has a non-Jewish girlfriend. Zuckerberg married a non-Jewish girl.

Go to Asana, the company created by Justin Rosenstein and Dustin Moskovitz(spelling?). Dustin was the closest co-founder to Mark of all facebook's co-founders. Justin is probably one of the brightest minds of the entire tech sector. A guy who graduated from Harvard summa cum laude without trying much.

And their company, Asana. My friend has a company which uses their services. I took a look, stumbled upon the About Us page. They have like 20-30 employees. Every single one of them are white. And aside from both of them, not a single name had a Jewish touch. And this was New York.

What does all of this say?

Let me answer it in an observation. The 'whiteness crisis' of the TV show 'Girls'. Created by Lena Dunham(mother is Jewish so ethnically she is Jewish and she was raised Jewish too). Yet a generation ago or so, since half the cast of the 4 girls were Jews, nobody would complain.

But being Jewish isn't enough anymore. The melding has gone so far that whether you are Jewish or not have become secondary. You're now primarily white.

A new report came out from the NYC Jewish federations. Intermarriage for non-Orthodox(a.k.a secular) Jews, the kind of Jews are the most likely to become successful, is now pushing 50 %. New York long resisted the national trends but even they are now succumbing. Now the total intermarriage rate actually flatlined, but that is because more and more Orthodox Jews are being born. But these Jews are highly religious and often their children don't even get basic mathematical education. So don't count on them to go very far.

From my vantage point, we're reaching a historic moment in American Jewry. The secular, all the more shrinking, part of Jewry is melding with the WASPs big time. Some Jews(primarily Jewish men) also marry Asians(and again, primarily East Asians at that).

Still, I am quite surprised at how often Jews intermarry at the highest levels of Silicon Valley. Zuckerberg is actually an exception. Most of the intermarriages I've noticed have been to WASPs. And although Asana might be extreme, you just take a look at top Silicon Valley VC firms with names like 'Andreesen Horowitz' to realize that the age-old WASP/Jewish divide has been long dead.

What does this mean? Well, I do think we're seeing Peak Jewish Achievement just about now, but it's a deeply inclusive Jewish experience, so inclusive perhaps, that some might say it isn't very Jewish at all.

And on the other end, the Orthodox are rising. Despising of their assimilating Jewish secular brethren. Afraid of the internet, dismissive of secularism. And voting Republican en masse(pushing 80 %!).

From a purely sociological point of view, the WASP/Jewish divide is very much alive among the elders of both communities. If you move in progressive white circles in NYC, I dare you to notice even a single inch of different between a gentile hipster girl in her 20s (or even 30s) and a Jewish girl with the same lifestyle.

This is, again, why I think the whole 'Girls whiteness crisis' was so telling. It represented my longheld suspicions that Jewishness is fading as a minority badge except in the most extreme cases. I'm not sure if I am too comfortable with that! But I see it as inevitable. I am no better. My girlfriend is a WASP too and I love her very much.

Speaking of Peak Jew and Nobels, I've been around certain venues for young gifted people who are interest in science. There are a few residual Jews remaining but the overwhelming numbers are Asian. I predict that the Nobel stats for 2050 will be very different than they are today.

Part of the Jewish scholarly advantage was that Jewish immigrant mothers were the original tiger mothers. That's not true at all about modern Jewish women.

"Jew have great minds. Need an Arabic translator, there's a Jew for that. Need a theoretical physicist, there's a Jew for that. Need a choreographer, there's a Jew for that.

Get the point? They are the g factor grand masters; they are the cream that rises to the top in whatever endeavor they choose to participate."

Permit a gentle critique?

1. By Jews you probably mean Ashkenazi Jews, that is, Jews descended from people who originally lived along the Rhine (the heart of Western Europe); later in other parts of northern europe. The Rhine was the long-time border between the Roman empire and Germany. The Ashkenazi most likely have a higher verbal and math ability than any other distinct ethnic group, although their spatial intelligence is probably normal or lower.

As Steve has pointed out on occasion, early writers in the ancient world do not appear to refer to Jewish populations as unusually intelligent.

2. Permit me to select a small group of a few million people in the US, of the same size as the Ashkenazi population in the US, say by selecting an equivalent number of the top scorers on the SAT, or a similar test, who are non-Ashkenazi. Now define this group as a distinct ethnic group and foster a strong sense of ethnic nepotism and ethnic self-interest among them. How would this group compare to the Ashkenazi? Perhaps a number of such groups could be formed, with a total population considerably larger than the Ashkenazi.

3. There is an implication in you statement that Jews are necessary if you want to have great minds as translators or physicists, but that doesn't follow. There may be many others with great minds as well. And how much better are these great minds? If Jewish great minds were twice as great as others, well, that would really matter. But nobody suggests that. If they are only 3% better, well, they are better, but it's hard to say it matters, in particular if there are 10 times as many of these almost-as-great minds. You also have to factor in the cost, that is, are these great minds hostile minds?

Another problem with Jewish "great minds" is that we now have lots of history of smart Jews getting it really wrong. Think Marx. Maybe particular Jewish verbal intelligence has come at a cost, perhaps not just in spatial intelligence but in "common sense". (Think Bobby Fischer, a real grand master). It sometimes seems as if Jews can get themselves totally confused by the verbal beauty of arguments that lead to idiotic results. They (like a lot of people) can completely ignore evidence in favor of pretty sounding arguments. They can't see that their complex verbal argument, taken one step back, seems to be a self-serving exercise in self-justification.

4. Permit me to do a test whereby I eliminate Jewish ethnic nepotism (perhaps by drafting everyone into those Hollywood movie platoons) and force all individuals to be judged on their own merits. Would Jews still be seen as unusual as you paint them?

5. If Jews are as luminary as you suggest, doesn't it behoove us to closely examine their moral character and goals and determine if they are as hostile to us as they sometimes suggest? You seem convinced of Jewish supremacy. If that is a common attitude, do we need to worry that Jews will act in their own interests, at our loss, if given the chance? Is this all just fancy rationale for "is it good for the Jews"? Given Jewish verbal acumen, this is very much a "watch what they do, not what they say" situation.

I don't know;the existence of this grouping does seems to indicate the degree to which people whose ancestors largely immigrated to the USA pre-1900* have coalesced into a kind of whole: the American people. Even the Catholic Irish have now melded into average Americans.

* It would be interesting to compare this group to Jewish Americans whose ancestors arrived before the large-scale immigration of Eastern European Jews (the people that Stephen Birmingham described in THE GRANDEES:AMERICA'S SEPHARDIC ELITE).I have a feeling that they would show a great deal of overlap.

I could complain about being a Jew who is QUITE not on the list and the sort of odd discomfort I feel by not having money yet being begrudged by istevers (and most Americans) as a supposedly rich jew, but instead of doing that I'll be redoubling my efforts to get on that goddamn list and increase that jewish percentage whether the jews already abroad like it or not (answer: they don't). Screw them and screw the anti-them, I'll get on the list (well, close enough at least) and whatever heartburn it gives to the established semites and the whiny anti-semites... all the better.

If Google maps could track anti-Semitism, I think we'd find huge waves of it radiating from wherever you happen to be.

See? - That's precisely the difference! I have zero, zilch, nada interest of getting anywhere near that list. As long as a can do what I enjoy doing (figuring out how things work) I am very content with just having a reasonably comfortable life (cars, house, no need to count money from paycheck to paycheck - enough to raise kids and hopefully not die in poverty). You do your thing - I do not mind at all, just let me do mine. One thing though: When I point out that there is a difference between us, why do you call me an anti-semite?

the cost is also vast inequality, which I think cannot and won't stand

You, poor naive soul - how is that life under the rock treating you? :-) Vast inequality works wonderfully well for Brazil and Mexico and that's where we are heading to, Brazil 2.0. It can and it will stand. Time to think where your kids will end up under this wonderful new merito-plutocracy.

"Lena Dunham(mother is Jewish so ethnically she is Jewish and she was raised Jewish too). Yet a generation ago or so, since half the cast of the 4 girls were Jews, nobody would complain." Dunham, Zosia Mamet, and Jemima Kirke are Jewish. "Jemima's maternal grandfather, Jack Dellal, is a British businessman of Iraqi Jewish descent, and her maternal grandmother was Israeli."

"A new report came out from the NYC Jewish federations. Intermarriage for non-Orthodox(a.k.a secular) Jews, the kind of Jews are the most likely to become successful, is now pushing 50 %. New York long resisted the national trends but even they are now succumbing.

This isn't a new trend and there is no portentous change coming. These stats ignore if the parents are ethnocentric Jews, how they raise their children, who raises the children, et cetera.

You have guys like Frum that is both irreligious, and married a gentile but raises his children as Jewish separatists, which doesn't seem to be a very atypical Jewish upbringing among secular Jews, with guys like Tim Wise reporting the same kind of background.

Then there is the issue of the intermarriage data not controlling for things like 2nd marriages which produce fewer, often no offspring and these 2nd and 3rd marriages making up a huge swath of 'intermarriage' among secular Jews. Then there is the propensity for mischlinge that aren't even raised Jewish to wind up like Bill Maher. He's no doubt very 'assimilated', but much more so in that the America that his gentile father grew up in 'assimilated' to accommodate the tastes and sensibilities of his ethnically Jewish son than it is an example of his son being as American as apple pie.

This great rise of Jewish wealth was inevitable. We've gone from an ingenuity economy to a genius economy. Ingenuity is not a common thing but not quite up there with genius. Prior to the rise of advanced computers and such stuff, the economy was driven by ingenuity than by genius. Though technology back in the 70s, 60s, and 50s looked amazing then, most of it wasn't genius stuff, i.e. even reasonable smart people could understand it, master it, improve it, and work in it. This was a time when US economy was driven mostly by factories manufacturing stuff. And this was when Japan rose to great heights by relying on ingenious adoption and improvement of Western technology. Japanese didn't show much in the way of genius but much in the way of ingenuity.

There was the rise of computers after WWII, but computers even up to the 80s wasn't what they would become in the age of the internet. Prior to the rise of hyper-technology, there was a distance between super-genius theory and real-world technology. In the past, super-geniuses could imagine and conceive of great stuff, but realizing them in the real world was still off in the future. So, real world technology and economy had to deal with pragmatic ingenious stuff than with super genius stuff. And until the internet, even advanced computer technology was limited in its marketability. So, one's profit potential was only so much. But with the rise of advanced computer technology, the gap between genius theory and practical application began to narrow. Geniuses could actually put their ideas to use and make tons of money. Thus, genius came to trump ingenuity. Japan, whose economy grew by ingenuity of stuff like walkman and cars, couldn't compete with supersmart Jews when it came to computers and such technology. In the past, geniuses had to make peace with the dominant mode of ingenuity in the economy. But as economy made way for genius, Jews were bound to win over others. When ingenuity was the main show in town, even goyim who were not geniuses but ingenious enough could play the game. (Even Soviet Union, by making a lot of steel and tanks, could 'compete' for spot as premier superpower.) It didn't take genius to create the Sony walkman. It only took ingenuity, and so Japan ran with the idea. But only a genius can come up with stuff like Google search engine. So, Jews win and win more. Japanese and Germans can compete with ingenuity but not with pure genius. It's like Werner Von Braun could build rockets but not the atomic bomb.

And when finance was simpler, reasonably intelligent people could enter and play the game. But as high finance became ever more complex, only those who could figure out that stuff could play, and most of the geniuses who understood it--at least better than the rest of us--were Jews.

Another reason for rise of Jewish wealth owes to the divorce between American entrepreneur and American labor. The marriage of the liberal business elite and American labor had been an unhappy one. Though ideologically tied to labor, American Jews who were rich-getting-richer found it difficult to grow their wealth by relying on American labor with all its Union demands and legality. American Jews wanted economic freedom to forge ahead, but they were weighed down by American labor(and their ideological allegiance to American labor). It was like the engagement between the Montgomery Clift character and Shelly Winters character in A PLACE IN THE SUN, based on Theodore Dreiser novel called AN AMERICAN TRAGEDY--which I haven't read. The Clift guy wants to enter the world of the rich family and marry the beautiful Elizabeth Taylor, but he's engaged to gross fat hag Shelly Winters who clings to him. She dies by accident, but he did plan to kill her. Similarly, American Jews(as they got richer)got sick of being tied to American labor made up of blue collar dummies. So, by promoting globalism and 'free trade' under Reagan and then Clinton, American Jews were able to cut their ties to American labor. American Jews on Silicon Valley and other enterprises could hire immigrant workers with H-1 visas and build factories in China and Mexico. American Jews and American labor had been in an unhappy marriage, but Jews finally found a way to conclude the divorce. (Though American Jews officially defended American labor, they pulled the strings so that Congressmen and Clinton would open up America to 'free trade'.) American labor thus went from being a wife of the Democratic Party elite to its neglected mistress--or even a murdered fat ho. Freed from the demands/costs of American Labor, Jews could make tons of money by playing the global system. (And if blue collar Americans complained, they were tagged with 'racism', 'xenophobia', and 'isolationism'.)

Also, we need to consider the advantage of the Jewish way of thinking. There are different modes of thinking: nounic thinking, verbic thinking, adjectivic thinking, and adverbic thinking. Nounic thinking deal with things and emphasizes rote memorization of things that exist and can be seen. Verbic thinking is about the processes between the nounic things of reality. Thus, the concept of evolution is an example of verbic thinking. Darwin didn't just collect data on stuff he found, but found the process-ive link between the things. Darwin thought... 'what is the temporal relation between THIS and THAT?' Thus, instead of seeing two things as two separate things of reality, he began to surmise how one thing could TURN INTO the other thing. The reason why Asia falls behind in thinking is it never fully bridged the gap between verbic thought and nounic thought. Thus, while there was stuff like Taoism that dealt with the process of change, it had nothing to do with actual reality. So, Asian verbic thought tended to be mystical while its rational thought tended to be nounic, i.e. Asians prefer to observe, take note of, and memorize things as individual entities. It was the West that bridged the verbic thought with nounic thought by finding the process-ive relations between things of the real world. Thus, Darwin's verbic theory wasn't mystical like Taoism but concerned with the actual happenings of the real world between real things. This was also true of western geology. Instead of just observing rock formations, theorists began to surmise the verbic relation between them, i.e. as 'this mountain could really have been pushed up from the bottom of the sea', or 'Africa and South America could have been part of one land mass'. With only nounic thinking, one can only see Africa and South America as separate entities. But with verbic thought, one can see the 'motion' whereby they could have been but separated. Given the emphasis on rote memory, Asia is still locked in nounic thinking.

Now, modern Italians, Greeks, and Latin Americans are more into adjectivic thinking than nounic or verbic thining. They are obsessed with spice, flavors, and looks/styles of things than their substance. That's why they are so superficial, trashy, and idiotic.

Jews have the highest form of thought, the adverbic thought. Jews not only mastered nounic and verbic thought but know the tricks of adverbic thought that not only takes notice of the processes/motions involved between the things but the minute aspects of the motion itself. This was what Einstein was all about though I still don't understand the theory. I'm just guessing.

With the rise of new economy where a genius idea can be used right away to produce mega-wealth, this adverbic thought is priceless to the Jews.

People who are hiding their wealth. I for one do not know of any crypto billionaires....

I know one who's not on the list, and if he were included he might qualify as the one and only American Indian among the 400. He's supposedly 1/4 or 1/8 Cherokee, and he lives next to George Bush on 14+ acres in Preston Hollow.

"Zuckerberg(although, he probably stole most of the facebook source code from the Winklevoss"My understanding is that the Winklevii were not programmers, they did not contribute code. They just hired Zuckerberg to create a website.

Regarding WASP intermarriage, n/a addressed that a while back. Jews are more likely to marry Catholics.

The Jewish Guy wrote "One theory why the share has risen is the corresponding rise of inequality in America. Although most Jews are against it(include myself), most elite Jews are for it. Which also explains the phenomenom of Republican Jews the closer to the top you get. "

Actually their is afaik no such phenomenon-Republican jews are heavily concentrated among the orthodox a on the shallow end of the jewish wealth pool. I'm curious, how are you defining elite in the above para.?

"What does this mean? Well, I do think we're seeing Peak Jewish Achievement just about now, but it's a deeply inclusive Jewish experience, so inclusive perhaps, that some might say it isn't very Jewish at all. "

I concur with the view that C20 could be called the Jewish Century. Not only were the Jews at the center of every major ruction, but they thoroughly won the peace. Thus at the tail end of the century even an apparently far away scuffle between jungle tribes in Rwanda comes to be viewed through the familiar post WWII prism: How could we allow another genocide to happen? Where was the counter-holocaust force of the UN? The root cause was colonialism and all the usual Cultural Marxist analysis, etc, etc.

So if we have reached 'peak Jew ' it is because the job is done. With the Clintons, the Bushes, the Rupert Murdochs, the way they are, it hardly matters whether a given 'rootless cosmopolitan' is a kosher one or not.

But there are fault lines in the WASP/Jew 'melding' as you describe it. How far will the Zionism of the WASP go under real pressure (say to maintain a balance of power with China)? Or is it even conceivable that secular Jews will throw Israel under the bus in the national interest? As a conservative, I find it hard to see this ending well.

Yawn. Give it up, will ya? Debt as a proportion of GDP declined for 35 years after WWII (until Reagan) and began to decline again under Clinton. Other countries are at least as Keynesian and face nothing like the debt problem of America. Of all the things someone of your political bent might grip about this is undoubtedly one of the dumbest.

There's some diversity within East Asia Steve. The current group of East Asian immigrants are post-1980 Chinese graduate students and restaurant Chinese chain-migrants. They look like a middle class group but there was a very different kind of Chinese migration a generation before them.

Thousands of elite Shanghai Chinese fled China at the end of the 1940s and their children did well, taking leadership posts in high verbal IQ fields.

Three examples: Oscar Tang (rich investment banker), Gerald Tsai (founder of Primerica and a legend in Wall Street during his time), William Lee (current managing partner of the large white shoe law firm WilmerHale).

"The NJPS 1990 found that mixed married households contained 770,000 children less than 18 years of age. According to the NJPS 1990, only 28% of these children were being raised as Jews; 41% were being raised in another religion; and 31% were being raised with no religion at all. Moreover, while 28% of children of intermarriage are being raised as Jews, only between 10% to 15% of this entire group ultimately marries Jews themselves. Thus, it is clear that nearly all the children of intermarriage are lost to the Jewish people.With respect to mixed marriage households, the NJPS 2000 appears to be consistent with the findings of NJPS 1990."

Jewish intermarriage rates with Catholics and Protestants:"According to the U.S. Religion Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, 39% of intermarried Jews are married to Catholics, even though Protestants outnumber Catholics in the U.S. by nearly two to one. Only 23% of intermarried Jews are married to Protestants."

Of course, that gives us data on only 62% of intermarried Jews. Presumably the remaining 38% are people who have no faith. It would, however, be interesting to find out what their familial confessional background is. For example, are they mostly from Protestant or Catholic backgrounds?As for the reason for this Catholic-Protestant dichotomy, most observers attribute it to geography, Catholics and Jews both being concentrated on the East Coast.

On the lack of East Europeans - I will make this point again - true Russian and Ukrainian Slavs (as opposed to "Russian Jews" or Russians of German/Polish descent) are well below Western Europeans in average intelligence. Their disfunctional behavior reminds me of blacks. There is probably a good reason why Germans over the centuries considered them "inferior".

And yet they somehow managed to create some of the greatest literary and musical works as well as control half the world and lead the space race for a while. Yeah I know that must have all been due to Germanic genes.

Only a Jew could call Jewish-Asian marriages and Jews like Bill Maher a "deeply inclusive Jewish" result that "isn't very Jewish at all." As Ky(le) notes, "the America that his gentile father grew up in 'assimilated' to accommodate the tastes and sensibilities of his ethnically Jewish son" rather than these being examples "as American as apple pie." Jews persist in regarding themselves as special exceptions while simultaneously bemoaning their purported assimilation and intermarriage rates. That they live in heavily Jewish environments and read Jewish publications and watch Jewish movies somehow escapes them when they describe themselves as quintessentially American and their milieu as the average American cultural experience.

One of the problems forIndians is that they aren't socially confident and its hard to see them in that light. I have a hard time remembering the last time I meant an Indian who gave off a moderately socially dominant impression.

The Italian versus Jewish is apt also because the earliest commentary of ability by ethnic groups in the West was by an Italian about everyone but the Jews.

The late Roman Empire writer Vegetius examined the comparative brains of all the various groups in the Roman Empire. Vegetius was read well into the Middle Ages. He is the creator of the aphorism - "If you want peace, prepare for war".

He wondered why his people the Italians dominated all others. He looked at intelligence and concluded that the smartest people were the Greeks. He didn't mention the Jews at all.

This is evidence for the notion that Ashkenazi Jews gained their brains sometime later. Cochran and Harpending have only one of many theories to explain this phenomenon.

I agree with the general consensus here about Jewish greatness and verbal skill opposed to robotic East Asian non-competitiveness.

The Jews were so clever and convincing that they, starting as one of many mere river tribes, persuaded all of their neighbors to adopt their culture and submit to their rule for thousands of years, and formed the foundation for the world' second power - holding within her borders 1.3 billion souls, 20-40 trillion in assets, and generating about $8 trillion GDP per year.

"And yet they somehow managed to create some of the greatest literary and musical works as well as control half the world and lead the space race for a while. Yeah I know that must have all been due to Germanic genes."

And Tolstoy? His family legend states the Tolstoys were descended from some "Indris" who was "a man of distinguished ancestry" who came from "the Germans, the Caesar's lands" (the Holy Roman Empire) to Chernigov, accompanied by his sons Litvinos and Zimonten and a force of 3000 men.

The Russian ruling class up to 1917 really was a different people from the serfs they ruled.

Although I agree with this observation as it applies to the pre-20th-century world of painting and sculpture, you overlook the significant contribution of Jews to the visual arts in the last 100 years.

Your viewpoint is confined to the pre-industrial visual arts of painting and sculpture (in which context your observation is accurate). However, photography and cinema are THE visual mediums of the 20th century; the camera and the screen ARE the brush, paint, canvas and clay of the modern age; they are the way our culture tells the story of itself and the way (for better or worse) we will be viewed, studied and understood by our descendants. Historians in the year 2500 will look (for better or worse) at Hollywood the way we view Renaissance Florence, Grecian urns and the Lascaux cave-walls today. And everywhere they look, they will see Jewish artists.

Diane Arbus (Jewish) is considered one of the most important and influential photographers of all time. Probably the most famous portrait photographer in the world today, Annie Leibovitz, is Jewish. As for “moving pictures”: Jews make up 37% of Oscar-winning directors. There are only 18 directors who have won 2 or more Oscars in the history of the award (a rare and exceptional feat); of that number, at least 7 (38%) are Jewish. Arguably the most prolifically and consistently successful film director of all time is Steven Spielberg (Jewish). He is credited with essentially inventing the “blockbuster” with his very first movie (Jaws, 1975), and has gone on since to create some of the most beloved, critically acclaimed and commercially successful films of all time (E.T., Indiana Jones, Jurassic Park, Schindler's List, etc.). (He may be criticized for his populist nature as an artist, but it bears noting that many artists venerated today were seen in their own time as unabashedly populist, from Shakespeare to Dickens to Dumas).

As for supposed “real visual art” (i.e. painting), Marc Chagall and Mark Rothko (both Jews) are two of the most significant painters of the past 100 years.

It is admittedly interesting that prior to the 20th century, for whatever reason, Jews were not particularly drawn to painting or sculpture. For the 20th-century Jews who did start moving into the visual arts, however, the brush and canvas probably seemed like “yesterday’s news” and the more enticing medium seemed to be the emerging new frontiers promised by the camera (whether film or photography), so this seems to be what 20th-century visual Jews preferred. Just as Jews are currently dominating the ‘wild west’ frontier of emerging digital /social media/ tech venture capital and business opportunities, it seems that Jews are usually keen to bypass established industries and modalities in favour of new frontiers with greater risk and uncertainty but lower barriers to entry and great potential to carve out new paths and create new business empires. Jews moving into the visual arts in the 20th century likely looked at the entrenched conventions, prejudices and hierarchies of the Eurocentric painting world, then looked at the brand new world and limitless aesthetic vistas promised by the camera, and made a characteristically forward-looking choice accordingly.

These examples (as exceptions to your otherwise generally valid observation) illustrate the fact that even in areas where Jews are not particularly well-represented historically, there are still almost always at least one or two Jews at the very top (beyond what you’d statistically predict for a group comprising only 0.2% of humans and only 2% of Americans).

“And their company, Asana. My friend has a company which uses their services. I took a look, stumbled upon the About Us page. They have like 20-30 employees. Every single one of them are white. And aside from both of them, not a single name had a Jewish touch. And this was New York.”

I just looked at the website of Asana: of the 33 people under “Our Team” (including Moskovitz and Rosenstein), at least seven are almost definitely Jewish (going by such typically Jewish Germanic names such as Kaplan and Krause, combined with typically Jewish academic backgrounds like “Business degree from University of Pennsylvania”). That’s 20% of the company, a ten-fold over-representation relative to the general population (a statistical over-representation even for a company recruiting from the NYC talent pool). And a good third of the Board of Advisors are noted Jewish tech investors.

In any case, Jews hardly suffer a "diluted Jewishness" by having "non-Jewish" names. Two of the most Jewish people I've ever known (one a journalist, the other a doctor, both fulfilling almost every positive and negative stereotype and both heavily politically involved in the Israel lobby) happen to both have the most generic, unassuming WASP names. If anything, one of the greatest assets of the Jews behind their ability to succeed in America is the fact that they basically look like any other Caucasian and thus could blend in and operate successfully within mainstream white society, but without ever quite fully assimilating. This gave Jews an advantage of optics that the Blacks could never have: the ability to be seen by Whites as White, making the discriminatory barriers against them in America that much easier to surmount than it ever has been for Blacks. (That being said, now that we've seen a (half-)Black President in the White House, it will be interesting to see how long it takes until we see an ethnically Jewish President. It may be a redundant formality at this point, given that the Federal Reserve and most of the key economic and political advisers behind the scenes in any given administration are already heavily Jewish.)

i was noticing the other day there were 2 successful jewish american tv anchor people with 2 successful jewish american politicians discussing obama's possible nomination for the defense secretary.and i thought to myself, well that makes perfect sense, because why shouldn't the american public have their foreign policy debate be framed thru only by american jewish discourse. they're so smart, why not. i am sure that is why they have those jobs too. so next, after the forbes list. can we get a percentage of how many pundits are jewish? and then tell us it's because they are smarter. we like stories like that. jews are just more talented. so it allmakes perfect sense.

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